“The origins of the cameras we use today were invented in the 19th century. Or were they? A millennia before, Arab scientist Alhazen was using the camera obscura to duplicate images, with Leonardo da Vinci following suit 500 years later and major innovations beginning in the 19th century. Eva Timothy tracks the trajectory from the most rudimentary cameras to the ubiquity of them today.”-TED Educator
click on this image to view the lesson from this video
A Facebook friend brought this lady Angel Olsen to my attention. I’m posting this for her use of 16mm film to create her videos. She has double and triple exposed her film. That’s no easy task. I hope you enjoy. Did I mention she has an old soul voice that I can’t place, she’s unique and beautiful. I wish her the bests.
“A transatlantic collaboration between four friends.
Two songs were written and recorded in Chicago and then sent to Vienna.
A song transformed into a film score and mailed across the Atlantic Ocean.
The score interpreted using an intuitive approach and a single roll of 16mm color negative film. The film exposed, rewound and re-exposed many times, developed and sent back across the Atlantic. These images were collected with the foreknowledge that the film would be extensively manipulated in the darkroom. An archaic homemade contact printer was used to create the final look and that film was hand-processed, and rinsed and repeated all in the same room in which the score began.
Time passing. The feeling of time. Collapsing space. Collapsing time. Collapsing time and space.
*16mm print available and recommended for screening purposes. This is the digital version.
“Sweet Dreams” available on Angel Olsen’s “Sleepwalker” 7 inch from Sixteen Tambourines
A transatlantic epistolary exchange between four friends.
A song transformed into a film score and mailed across the Atlantic Ocean.
The score interpreted using a single roll of tri-x 16mm film. The film exposed, rewound and re-exposed many times, developed and sent back across the Atlantic. A response was filmed and the two spliced together.
*16mm print available and recommended for screening purposes. This is the digital version.
This video is part of an ongoing series of photo and video portraits of contemporary inventors from all walks of life. More can be seen here.
It’s been way too long since I’ve posted one of these. This is my portrait of Steven Sasson, inventor of the digital camera. He was the 32nd inventor in my project. I shot him in October at Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, just a couple weeks before President Obama awarded him the National Medal of Technology.
When he initially mentioned that the first digital camera held 30 pictures, I assumed that was due to the storage capacity of the digital tape. It was really interesting to hear that he picked 30 as an artificial limitation, and his explanation why.
Update: A lot of people have asked what the subject of that first photo was. It’s an interesting story, but the short answer is that the first digital photo was a picture of a lab technician named Joy. And he didn’t save the image.